Farmers growing crops such as cotton, corn and rice commonly use insecticides, and in particular, adulticides, to control the population of detrimental insects, and to minimize the damage caused by the insects. Insecticides are often applied to the soil to kill larvae, or sprayed on the plants to kill the adult insects.
Farmers need to use insecticides in order to grow enough crops to feed the ever increasing population with the ever decreasing amount of available farmland. However, even though food prices would significantly escalate, and food would undoubtedly become scarce without the use of insecticides, the widespread use of insecticides has been opposed because of actual and perceived detrimental environmental and health problems. These problems include the contamination of groundwater and the actual or perceived toxicity of food products containing residual insecticides.
Efforts have been made to increase the effectiveness and selectivity of insecticidal compositions. One method which has been developed involves combining insecticides with bait formulations, typically including insect attractants such as pheremones. In theory, less insecticide is used, and over a narrower area, because the insects are attracted to a specified location. These attractants are more or less efficacious in their attractant power, and help with the selectivity of the insecticide toward harmful rather than beneficial insects. However, a limitation of this approach is that the attractive power of the attractant is generally insufficient for non-confined areas such as crop fields.
It would be advantageous to provide compositions and methods which can lower the residue on crops, and which can be applied to the crops rather that in non-confined areas. For health reasons as well as marketing reasons, there remains a desire to provide insecticidal compositions and methods of using same that provide even less residue than the most effective insecticides to date. The present invention provides such compositions and methods.